With a widespread usage of computers and emergence of new technologies for information dissemination, such as Internet, the amount of information available to a user on his/her request quickly exceeds the user's ability to manage it. It happens in all areas of information technology, not leaving aside the area of intellectual property.
Patent applications are required to provide full disclosure of inventions, sufficient for someone skilled in the art to reproduce the invention. To satisfy this requirement, a uniform rigid sequential template for patent applications was developed to follow in Patent Offices around the world. As a result, many patent specifications, especially in high-tech area, are overloaded with information, approaching in size and complexity to books. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,850,446, 5,889,863, 5,812,668 and 5,943,424 are each about 250 pages long, contain dozens of figures and hundreds of claims. Just to get acquainted with them, let alone to comprehend, would require significant time and effort even for highly skilled professionals in the field. Though such a detailed disclosure could be definitely appreciated by some categories of patent users, others might be prevented from doing anything useful at all by shear volume of the available content. The problem is getting worse when such a volume of information has to be transmitted over a network, which not only clatters a user's display, but also wastes bandwidth and slows down the network traffic.
The remedies to this situation tried so far include limiting the amount of information sent to the user by employing various techniques of information volume reduction, e.g. sending/displaying only the first page of a patent disclosure (former USPTO bibliographic database at http://www.uspto.gov or Micropatent™ database at http://www.micropatent.com), filtering out anything but abstract and claims (IBM Patent Server at http://www.ibm.com/patent), and splitting monolithic patent disclosure into pieces and reconnecting them via HTML hyperlinks (IBM's Intellectual Property Network Server at http://www.delphion.com). Though definitely helpful, the above-mentioned approaches suffer from serious drawbacks, the most notable of which is sharp decrease in the user's chances to make an informed decision, because it is based on insufficient amount of information actually considered.
Accordingly, there is a need to develop an alternative approach of presenting and delivering patent document information which would provide value enhanced representation of the document and facilitate easier and quicker comprehension of the patent information.